Asian Americans in US report nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents within a year: report

LOS ANGELES - Asian Americans in the United States reported nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents in less than a year during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report released Tuesday by a coalition of Asian American groups.

The report was issued by the Stop Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Hate, a leading aggregator of incidents against Asian Americans during the pandemic. The Stop AAPI Hate reporting center was launched on March 19, 2020 by the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action and San Francisco State University's Asian American Studies Department.

From March 19, 2020 to Feb 28 this year, the reporting center received a total of 3,795 incidents of anti-Asian racism nationwide. Types of discrimination range from verbal harassment, shunning, physical assault, online harassment to civil rights violations.

The report showed that verbal harassment (68.1 percent), shunning (20.5 percent) and physical assault (11.1 percent) make up the three largest proportions of the total incidents reported.

The new report also showed that women reported hate incidents 2.3 times more than men while Chinese are the largest ethnic group (42.2 percent) that report experiencing hate, followed by Koreans (14.8 percent) and Vietnamese (8.5 percent).

Businesses are the primary site of discrimination (35.4 percent), followed by public streets (25.3 percent), and public parks (9.8 percent). Online incidents account for 10.8 percent of the total incidents, according to the report.

A total of 1,691 of those reports (44.56 percent) were from California, followed by New York state which reported 517 incidents (13.62 percent).

"The number of hate incidents reported to our center represent only a fraction of the number of hate incidents that actually occur, but it does show how vulnerable Asian Americans are to discrimination, and the types of discrimination they face," authors of the report noted.

"Hate incidents are not abating. We cannot let anti-Asian American hate be a legacy of COVID-19 or the last presidential administration, but that's exactly what will happen unless we demand concrete action," Russell Jeung, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, said in a statement.

Jeung noted on the organization's official Twitter account that unless something changes, "there may be a light at the end of the tunnel for the pandemic, but not for AAPIs".